The scent of exhaust fumes fill the air on a mid-January afternoon. Cars, trucks and buses zip back and forth from downtown Buffalo on the Kensington Expressway, also known as the Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway.

This section of Route 33 was built in the early ’60s, wiping out a tree-lined parkway designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Today, the sunken, six-lane expressway cuts straight through an African-American community.

“It was like they were building the Erie Canal that’s what it reminded you of this big elongated ditch,” said 67-year-old Al Thompson, who lives nearby.

He remembers playing football with friends on the Humboldt Parkway’s wide median strip. He also remembers when the parkway was destroyed.

Thompson describes the expressway as a road built so that whites working downtown could quickly get to and from their suburban homes.

“You would look down on to the expressway and you can see into the cars, from the bridges going across,” he said. “It’s all white folks. During the rush hours leaving town.”

Thompson and others see the expressway as a symbol of redlining. That federal policy guided home loans for years after World War II. Experts say it led to racially segregated city neighborhoods and mostly white suburbs.

“Now, it wasn’t until later when I got to be a bit more academically astute, that I understood how sinister the aspect of redlining was. And in my mind, that 33 is the Redline Express,” Thompson said.

Henry Taylor Jr., founding director for The University at Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies, said the expressway changed city neighborhoods.

“They planned the design and construction of the 33, really before the African American population got there. So they had not yet started construction until the 1960s,” he said. “So whites knew that the highway was coming through and they started to sell their houses to blacks.”

Highways were put in areas where there were fewer single-family houses, and more industry, he said. Lower income workers, blacks and Latinos typically lived in these areas.

“So they’re living on the lands that are most likely to be polluted. And they’re living on lands that are historically situated near your transportation linkages,” Taylor said.

Julian Marshall is a University of Washington professor and co-author of a report on one of those pollutants: nitrogen dioxide. It’s emitted from vehicles, and can contribute to asthma.

The report showed that, across the nation, minorities face a much higher exposure than whites.

“There’s this enormous historic lag, to where people are and where pollution is,” Marshall said. “The forces from 50 years ago are still alive today. If we built a highway, that highway will very likely still exist.”

Experts have some ideas for reducing these disparities.

Marshall says government officials should continue to push to reduce air pollution. Taylor says solutions can start with changing the road system.

“So right now part of the problem with the 33 and the thousands upon thousands of cars, no green infrastructure,” Taylor said.

Thompson has some ideas, too.

He has a form of leukemia that some studies suggest is linked to vehicle emissions. The disease is in remission, and he spends much of his free time working with a group called Restore Our Community Coalition.

It aims to raise money to cover part of Route 33 and restore the lush, green Humboldt Parkway. Thompson thinks that could address old wounds from redlining.

“It will go a long, long way to the healing of some of the ills that plagued us,” he said. “And it will be a physical example for all to see that ‘yes we were wrong we made a mistake,’ but we made it right… now.”

The nation’s top transportation official said Buffalo should consider resurrecting at least a portion of the grand, tree-lined boulevard that once stretched 3 miles from Delaware Park to Martin Luther King Jr. Park – before it was replaced by an expressway that split the neighborhood.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx said it’s incumbent on Buffalo and other cities to explore how to revive neighborhoods decimated by the urban renewal projects of the 1950s and ’60s.

In April, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced $6 million to complete a Department of Transportation study on the feasibility of covering a portion of the Kensington Expressway, also known as Route 33, and return it to a tree-lined parkway and promenade.

Doing so won’t come cheap: The 2012 DOT study showed a $600 million price tag in 2018 dollars for what was named Alternate D. It would deck the highway and create green space over a three-quarter-mile portion between East Ferry and Best streets.

“I grew up in a neighborhood that was carved up,” Foxx told The Buffalo News. “The lingering effect of those kinds of decisions across the country was that there was poor connectivity in almost every way – from a neighborhood economic standpoint and from a community vitality standpoint.

“We have to help communities trying to reinvent themselves and reconnect themselves to find ways to do so,” Foxx said.

Foxx, who has been transportation secretary since April 2013, lived in a low-income, mostly African-American neighborhood in Charlotte, N.C., that was divided by a freeway. Transportation planners and community engineers routinely routed highways through minority and low-income neighborhoods as the preferred way to take cars off city streets, move people more quickly to airports and speed up the commute to and from the suburbs. As in Buffalo, it typically occurred over objections of the affected communities.

Foxx, who was Charlotte’s mayor before his current job and has eight months left in office under President Obama, said the issue of addressing the harm done by urban renewal also is timely.

“This is particularly important now because we will be replacing or rebuilding so much of our infrastructure,” Foxx said. “If we do it correctly, we can begin correcting some of the mistakes that were made, including to places historically underserved and neglected.”

Riding horses

Tanya Redmond, a retired phone company worker, remembers riding horses as a girl on Humboldt Parkway, surrounded by rows of Dutch elm and maple trees.

“There were beautiful trees that were straight on one side, and straight on the other,” Redmond said. “It was in the middle where the activities would take place. It was just a peaceful place. We always called it ‘the Park.’ ”

An estimated 300 trees were cut down to make way for the highway on the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed parkway. Hundreds of families were forcibly relocated by the time the green respite from urban living disappeared by the mid-’60s and the below-grade expressway, with five bridges, divided the community.

“I feel angry that such a beautiful area was taken away from us. It was gorgeous,” Redmond said. “It split this part of our community up.”

Redmond’s father, Clarke Eaton Jr., was one of the first to advocate restoring the parkway as a way to make the community whole again.

“It was my father’s vision for 40 years, and he’s 81 now,” she said. “I pray he lives long enough to see a groundbreaking.”

Don Hill, who grew up on Humboldt Parkway, said the parkway’s destruction coincided with the flight of Jews, Italians, Germans and others to the suburbs.

Hill has many fond memories of the parkway, like walking to school in the wintertime.

“It was like walking through an Ansel Adams photo,” Hill said. “That’s why many of us who grew up in the area were just devastated. It was a spectacular parkway.

“They said it was ‘for the sake of progress,’ but it was just to get people from downtown out to the suburbs, and it didn’t matter to them what it did to the people living here.”

But Hill, 70, remains hopeful. “I’m happy for the movement to make this a Frederick Law Olmsted city, and to restore his vision to what it once was.”

Completing the study

The DOT study announced by Cuomo is the follow-up to the department’s preliminary engineering feasibility report issued in August 2012. It is expected to provide a more complete environmental assessment and detailed cost analysis.

Both studies came about as the result of community advocacy, including efforts by the Restore Our Community Coalition and Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples-Stokes.

Karen Stanley Fleming, ROCC’s executive director, said the study will point the way to the best course of action. That could mean supporting the decking and green space between East Ferry and Best streets, Fleming said, or another approach that reconnects the entire span between Delaware and Martin Luther King Jr. parks.

Fleming said more than the sheer economic cost needs to be weighed.

“You have to look at the investment and the repairing of a community that was destroyed,” she said. “This is going to bring back a neighborhood and improve property values.”

A 2014 economic study prepared by the University at Buffalo Regional Institute’s Urban Design project found there would be a significant economic impact from an increase in property values along the parkway, higher tax revenues and hundreds of construction jobs.

“We think the time is now to move on this, and we are very excited that this is exactly the type of project Secretary Foxx is speaking of,” Fleming said.

Peoples-Stokes, who pushed for both DOT studies, said the waterfront’s resurgence gives her confidence the parkway can also come back to life.

“Urban areas don’t thrive when you take everything out of them,” Peoples-Stokes said. “They thrive when you put everything in them.”

Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, said it took years and many incremental steps to turn the waterfront around, and suggested it may be necessary to start with a smaller area such as Northampton Street to Best to get things going along Humboldt Parkway.

“Projects like this need a start, not a finish, and I think the Best Street corridor is going to be very, very important,” Higgins said, noting its proximity to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the Buffalo Museum of Science, City Honors School and the Johnnie B. Wiley sports complex. “If we could get that done in a decade, I think it would demonstrate tangible progress, and be a major contribution to righting that historical wrong.”

Higgins said there’s a reasonable chance that a massive investment will be made in the nation’s aging roads, bridges and rail in the coming years, with the prospect of federal funding for large infrastructure projects like this one.

When Cuomo announced the $6 million study on April 6 at the Buffalo Museum of Science, it was met with loud cheers from the audience.

“Most places have reversed their mistakes, and that’s what we are going to be doing here,” Cuomo told them.

Later, the governor told The Buffalo News it was possible for the state to provide significant funding for the project.

The state’s new budget for the 2016-17 fiscal year revives an old idea that eventually could reunite a historic East Side neighborhood torn apart by the 1950s construction of the Kensington Expressway.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo elicited a chorus of oohs and aahs during his appearance at the Buffalo Museum of Science on Wednesday as he unveiled a $6 million effort to study covering a three-quarter-mile stretch of the Kensington between Best and Ferry streets, transforming it into a tree-lined parkway.

“It was originally the Humboldt Parkway, it was beautiful, and it was part of the Olmsted design,” Cuomo said. “In the mid-’50s, we had a better idea and it turned out not to be a better idea, which was to move vehicles in and out of Buffalo faster by building a highway. This was not just in Buffalo; this was all over the United States.

“Most places have reversed their mistakes, and that’s what we are going to be doing here,” the governor said to cheers from the audience.

The state Department of Transportation has estimated that the cost could surpass $500 million to fully restore that stretch of the East Side neighborhood. A community group, Restore Our Community Coalition, has been advocating for a study since 2012.

In fact, state transportation planners were considering the idea back in 2009. The area’s transportation planning organization took initial steps then toward a $2 million study of the idea, which was proposed years before that by former State Sen. Antoine M. Thompson when he was the Masten District member of the Common Council.

Cuomo told The Buffalo News editorial board later Wednesday that it is possible for the state to come through with significant funding for the project.

“These transportation projects – you bond them, they’re done over time, and they’re doable,” he said.

Cuomo also reiterated plans to spend $30 million on turning the Scajaquada Expressway into an urban boulevard, with $54 million more to support the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority. An additional $4 million will be spent for the next phase of returning cars to Main Street in downtown Buffalo.

An additional $4.5 million also is being invested in Niagara Falls State Park and two other state parks upstate.

“With these investments, Buffalo will really start to be restoring the very fabric and restoring community,” Cuomo said.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Before it was cars and concrete, the view for people who live along this part of the 33 in Buffalo used to be much greener.

“It took $45 million back in 1954 to destroy Humboldt Parkway, which today would accumulate to up to $400 million so, the state certainly had the money to destroy the parkway, so now they most certainly have the money to repair the parkway,” said Restore Our Community Coalition Research Associate Bradley Bethel, Jr.

The coming year’s budget includes $6 million for environmental and design assessments to study restoring one-third of the original Humboldt Parkway. ROCC supports a design that would cover a mile of the expressway.

“The covering will completely leave the freeway alone,” said Bethel. “People will still be able to commute from downtown to the airport as they wish.”

Those in favor of the project say reconnecting the neighborhood can help spur economic growth on the city’s east side, an area some say was left behind while the rest of Buffalo experienced a so-called renaissance.

“We’re envisioning a completely rejuvenated east side, bringing a part of the city that has been disenfranchised for about 50 years, brining it into the fuller narrative of the city’s redevelopment,” said Bethel.

Bethel says that could include increased property values and may help attract businesses to the area.

Next up, he says the environmental study will take a look at air and soil quality. He says the design and build phase could take up to five years.

BUFFALO, N.Y. – A $6 million study will look at the possibility of covering the part of the 33 that runs from Ferry Street to Best Street.

“This is an example of how all aspects of the city should be included whenever investment is made,” says Karen Stanley Fleming.

Stanley Fleming is the Executive Director of the Restore Our Community Coalition, an advocacy group pushing to restore Humboldt Parkway. Coalition members say $4 million would fund a study of design alternatives and an environmental assessment. That would take three years.

“To restore this parcel of land does a lot to lift the spirit of a community whose spirit has died because of what’s happening with this wall,” says Stephanie Geter, ROCC Board President.

Then, it would take an additional two years and $2 million to create construction drawings and manage the bid process. Shovels could be in the ground in four to five years.

The state funding means a lot to Richard Cummings.

“I got roots here. My grandparents grew up on Girard Place, and my parents right now live right across the street from the park,” says Cummings.

But by the time Cummings moved here in 1969 from Chicago, the trees were already gone.

“I remember seeing the construction and the dirt and hearing the pounding,” he says.

The result ended up dividing the community. A U.B. study done previously showed the investment of this restorative project would pay off with businesses coming back and homes rising in value.

“All of the homes that we see here around Humboldt have lost their property values incredibly because of this chasm in front of us. But in addition, there have been serious detrimental environmental and health damages to many homes in this parkway,” says Stanley Fleming.

“So to restore that, to us, means everything. Just brings back to life. It’s our restorative kind of branch happening in this whole reborn Buffalo movement,” says Geter.

The current estimate for the total cost is $570 million, but the work the NYSDOT does with the $6 million will give us a more accurate number.

If ultimately approved, the project would be paid for with a mix of state and federal funding, as well as private donations.

Buffalo is not the only city in America that is faced with highways that run through its parks, and freeways that blockade its people from the waterfront. Numerous other cities around the world are faced with similar issues, although there is a growing movement to remove the troublesome roadways that tend to tear urban communities apart. WaPo has posted an article, written by Ashley Halsey III, which recounts the thoughts, recollections and policy wishes of US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx who discovered firsthand the pitfalls of freeways after being physically torn away from the urban fabric of his hometown Charlotte, NC.

Like Buffalo’s East Side, this is a story of a man and a people who were divided from the fruits of city. Today Buffalo’s East Side continues to reel from the archaic transportation decisions that made it easier for people to get in and out of the city, at the expense of those who were currently living in it.

Now Foxx is on a mission to right some of these wrongs. He’s talking about doing away with the freeways and bringing back sidewalks and bike lanes to people who have gone without long enough. He’s looking at longterm population growth, and a need to accommodate people who want to walk to a store rather than driving across town.

Foxx is reaching out to city and state leaders, to impress upon them the need to reconnect their cities by tearing down the sunken walls. When these freeways were built, the poorest communities suffered the most thanks to urban renewal measures. Neighborhoods were ruptured and demolished, leaving in their wake public housing and isolated neighborhoods.

Buffalo should invite Foxx to come and examine this city’s past urban freeway mistakes. Enough pain has been endured. If one is to take into account that Buffalo is the third poorest city in the nation, and half of the city’s geography is disconnected from the neighborhoods that are experiencing a renaissance, there is an urgency at hand that must be addressed.

The freeways in question are all interconnected, calling for a sweeping plan to reconnect a disenfranchised people to the heart of the city, and an entire populace to one of the world’s greatest assets – Lake Erie and the Niagara River.

Lead image: Neighbors living around Humboldt Parkway/Kensington Expressway are rallying together in hopes that one day they might see the revitalization of their neighborhood, with a transition from freeway to “Green Parkway”.

The construction of the Kensington Expressway, displacing hundreds of homes and a Frederick Law Olmsted-designed parkway, is regarded as one of Buffalo’s great blunders. Before construction began in 1957, however, the expressway was pushed by business, labor, and even military interests as necessary to the region’s progress.

At a 1954 Common Council hearing, Chamber of Commerce president Charles Fichtner asserted that the Kensington Expressway is a “golden opportunity” and that failure of the city to accept the project would be “a little short of civic treason.” Ralph Peo, chairman of the Buffalo Civic Full Employment Committee, urged action, warning that “there are many thousands of breadwinners among us who are now unemployed.” Major General Edwin Ziegler cited the need for high-speed highways to move people out of Buffalo in the event of enemy attack from the air. Resident objections were dismissed, as Erie County Savings Bank president Dexter Rumsey pleaded, “Let’s not study any more. Let’s move.” The Common Council voted unanimously, in a 15-0 vote, to approve a resolution endorsing the state-sponsored project. This photograph, taken for the New York State Department of Public Works, shows its first phase of construction from Michigan Avenue to Landon Street, completed in 1962.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, a former mayor of Charlotte, N.C., has plenty left to do in the Obama administration’s final year. His agency is pushing cities to improve bicycle and pedestrian safety, hosting a “Smart City” competition to showcase how technology can improve transportation, and doling out money from a new five-year, $305 billion federal transportation package.

Restoring Humboldt Parkway Could Cost $500 Million

(Photo: WGRZ)

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Correcting what one group calls the “Kensington mistake” comes with a huge price tag. The group, Restore Our Community Coalition, estimates it would cost around $500 million to create a green parkway over the 33 from Best Street to Ferry Street.

The stretch we’re talking about goes for almost three-quarters of a mile. It was the topic of a town hall meeting Tuesday night.

The Buffalo Common Council approved getting rid of the original parkway back in 1954, and this coalition wants to restore the Kensington back to its original design, a tree-lined parkway, by covering the expressway.

They showed many examples of other cities that have successfully built green parkways over highways including Seattle, Dallas and Phoenix.

The goal of the Restore Our Community Coalition in 2016 is to raise money. Its leaders explained where it could come from.

“Hopefully, from the federal government and some philanthropists. This has been done across the country and different cities with a combination of both. In some cases, most of the money came from philanthropists, and in other cases most of it came from the government. But no matter what the cost is, we had a study done by UB and it will pay for itself plus create profit to the community” said Richard Cummings from ROCC.

Assemblyman Sean Ryan was at the meeting. His spokesperson tells us that like any major road construction project, this would need a combination of state and federal funding. Ryan is involved now, early on, to help figure out what those funding sources might be.

Nothing has been approved, but this coming year, the Coalition wants to come up with a preliminary design, do an environmental assessment, produce plans, and fundraise.

Community members ask for support to restore Humboldt Parkway

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB)- Community leaders in Buffalo want to restore Humboldt Parkway to its former glory. The ambitious plan is still in the preliminary stages.

“Something of this caliber can be accomplished in the City of Buffalo,” said Bradley Bethel, Jr. with Restore Our Community Coalition (ROCC).

ROCC spoke in front of NYS Department of Transportation representatives and public officials, including Assemblyman Sean Ryan, on Tuesday night. The group has been working on plans to change the road pattern since 2012.

The Kensington Expressway cuts right through East Side neighborhoods.

“You can’t cross it to get to a store or even see a neighbor,” said Inez Hord, a longtime resident.

Hord has lived a block from Humboldt Parkway since 1962 and remembers what the road was like before that section of NY-33 was built.

“Beautiful, with trees, grass and greenery, children playing in the parkway, just beautiful,” said Hord.

A group of community leaders want to restore the parkway.

The DOT has come up with options that include lowering parts of Kensington Expressway and running it underneath a parkway. The next step would include scoping and creating preliminary designs, which could cost six million dollars, according to the DOT.

“We’ve had about two dozen cities across the country who have accomplished this over the past 40 years,” said Bethel.

ROCC estimates it will cost $570 million to fully restore the mile between East Ferry and Best St. The group is now asking for public support so they can secure grants to reunite the neighborhood.

“Improved property values, less noise and pollution in our neighborhood, and eventually commercial reinvestment in the Fillmore and Jefferson commercial districts,” said Bethel.

They estimate the project would create more than 900 jobs.

Inez Hord said it’s worth paying tax dollars to complete.

“It would be a wonderful thing,” said Hord. “I believe it’s possible but I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime.”

Residents want park built over Kensington Expressway

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) – Residents of the Humboldt Parkway neighborhood came out Tuesday night to build support for their idea to build a park over the Kensington Expressway.

Residents say Rt. 33 divides the historic neighborhood. Those activists, with the Restore our Community Coalition, want the neighborhood to have a similar feel for what it used to be.

The meeting took place Monday night at the Frank Merriweather Library.

Activists say “the mistake was to destroy a central piece to an internationally acclaimed park system, dividing a community, leaving a roadway as a scar that continues to serve as a physical and psychological barrier to full economic participation by all areas of Buffalo.”

Advocates also believe that putting an expressway so close to homes causes health issues.

The coalition had four goals Monday night: to discuss preliminary design ideas, discuss other parks that cover highways, review the original parkway in the Kensington Expressway’s place and talk about how to raise awareness.

According to the community coalition, the Expressway “destroyed the clean, green gathering space along Humboldt Parkway.”